


Wireless

by WaterandWin



Series: Unplugged [2]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Future, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Gen, M/M, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-14
Updated: 2016-08-14
Packaged: 2018-08-08 15:01:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7762414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WaterandWin/pseuds/WaterandWin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky Barnes has to face the Winter Soldier</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wireless

**Author's Note:**

> A sequel, finally! Only a year and a half late. Since _Unplugged_ I wrote my undergraduate thesis, graduated, moved out on my own for the first time, and worked about 50 hours a week between two jobs. Seeing as I'm starting grad school next week and the deadline is here, I figured I'd post what I have. 
> 
> And now, sleep.

The curtain was drawn. In the Carter house, it always was. In his first few months there, Bucky had missed the sun like a desert wanderer missed water, or a drowning man missed air. He never quite got over its absence, but he did eventually come to find something almost just as bright.

Steve was grinning like he had a secret. “It’s pretty illegal stuff, Buck. I’m not sure you wanna see ‘em.”

“Are you shitting me?” Bucky asked. “Of course I wanna see ‘em! Anything’s more interesting than this!”

They were sitting on the floor in Steve’s room, as they did most days, though most days they usually had something more interesting to play with than a half-disassembled toy hoverpod. Steve’s father had given it to them to reverse-engineer—practice for when Steve would one day inherit the shop—but neither had the mind for mechanics nor the interest, and they had both long since forgotten how all the parts fit back together anyway. That, and their electromagnetic screwdriver had stopped working.

“Well, they are pretty interesting,” Steve agreed, and pretended to think some more about it. “But you can’t tell anyone I showed you. Especially not my folks!”

“Cross my heart and hope to die, pal,” Bucky assured, mining the motion across his chest.

Steve apparently decided to take his word for it because he climbed to his feet. “It’s in their room,” he explained in a whisper. “Step exactly where I step, or else they’ll hear us from downstairs. Got it?”

Bucky nodded so hard he wouldn’t have been surprised if Steve heard his brain rattle.

So down the hall the two boys went, past the stairs, and to the master bedroom. It wasn’t very far but it felt like it, what with part of the journey spent pressed against the wall to avoid the creaky middle of the hallway. Steve could only push the door open so far before it made a noise, so they both had to squeeze in through just a crack. Once inside, Steve motioned for Bucky to shimmy under the bed with him.

The covers hung down to the floor on every side, so it made for the perfect hiding spot so long as they didn’t mind lying on their stomachs. Just like in Steve’s room, there was a secret latch to be found and pulled, and a wall compartment that slid back to reveal a cramped storage space. Inside were a number of bags and dusty boxes, and Bucky watched in awe as Steve pulled the aforementioned illegal contraband from an old red backpack covered in yellow reflective tape that was either very old or very carefully peeled of its shine. The thing Steve pulled from it was wrapped in layers upon layers handkerchiefs. He unwound it with such care Bucky expected it to be something more than an old data drive when Steve dropped it in his palm.

“This,” Bucky asked, “is a movie?”

“Careful with that,” Steve hissed, taking the drive back. “It’s way old. It’s got movies on it from before dataports.”

“There were movies before dataports?” Bucky asked as Steve plugged the drive into a clunky old folding box. Once it was inside, the whole box made a nasty whirring noise, and the screen lit up to some archaic-looking startup text.

“Sure, loads,” Steve explained. “Most of ‘em were destroyed ‘cause the New Order said so, but my dad has all of these stashed under here for some reason. I’ve seen ‘em all at least a hundred times, but this one’s my favorite.”

Bucky watched as the screen came to life in grainy black and white.

“Where’s the sound?” he asked when none came.

“There isn’t any on this one, s'far as I can tell,” Steve replied. “The others do though. They got color, too, and a story. I just wanted to show you this one first.”

The quality was wretched. It was some kind of shoot-out scene from what Bucky could make of it, but all the figures were barely more than blurs. Steve must have noticed his look of confusion because he added, “my dad says it’s a copy of a copy of a copy. Look, see those numbers in the corner?”

Bucky squinted to where Steve’s finger pressed against the plastic. “One nine four four?”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “Nineteen forty-four. Before the New Order reset the year. Oh, shush, here he comes!”

 _He_ was a cluster of grey pixels, no different than any of the other clusters of grey pixels save for some round object painted like a target he carried in front of him. At first Bucky thought it was some kind of frisbee from the way he threw it, but when he saw the way bullets bounced off of it, he realized it was a shield. There were a few more shots of the man with the shield—walking through some rubble, running, pouring over a map—and then the film started right back over again.

Bucky stared at the screen as all the little men-shaped blocks run through the same motions as before. Steve certainly didn’t make like he was bored watching it through the second time.

“That’s it?” Bucky finally dared ask when the film started over for a third time. “What even happened? Who was that?”

“Captain America!” Steve said like this was the most obvious thing in the world. “You’ve never heard of Captain America?”

Bucky gave him a look like he was crazy. Then he offered, “ain’t that what they used to call this place in the Old Order? America?”

“Well, yeah,” Steve deflated. “But that happened way later. You’ve honestly never heard of ‘im?”

“Nah, never,” Bucky said, and then, “tell me?”

“He was... I mean, I don’t really understand all of it myself,” Steve began. “From what my mom says her parents told her, the New Order wasn’t the first time that somebody got it all up in their heads to improve human beings as a race. The first time there was a big war, too, but they ended up losing in the end cause we had the Captain.”

“So he’s the bad guy,” Bucky finished.

“No!” Steve shoved at him, harder than playfully. “‘Course not! He was protectin’ us!”

“From what?” Bucky sneered. “From progress?”

“Shut your mouth!” Steve spat back. “My mom was right. They _do_ brainwash you at the Academy!”

“They—” Bucky started, then bit his lip to shut himself up. The Academy had become a bit of a sore subject for him since he’d come to be cooped up in the Carter household. At the Academy, they’d told everyone that Epsilons deserved to die because their blood was dirty, and now here he was, an Epsilon himself. He didn’t feel any dirtier than he did a month ago. And he knew it certainly wasn’t fair. He just wasn’t ready to admit that everything he and all his old friends believed could be lies.

“I still don’t get what so special about him,” he said anyway.

“Who? Captain America? He’s... he stands up to them, that’s all,” Steve explained, eyebrows still knit together. His lower lip was pushed out like he might start to cry any minute. “He could be a Beta, maybe even a Beta plus, but he stands up to them anyway. He stands up to them and he wins.”

Bucky cocked his head. “So?”

Steve huffed and shut the screen. “Forget it. I shouldn’t ‘a showed it to ya anyway.”

Just then, before Bucky would ask anything else or Steve could elaborate, there was a creak of floorboards up the stairs. The boys froze, listening, as the footsteps went down the other end of the hall, turned around, and came straight their way. The master bedroom door creaked, and then a few steps later the covers of the bed flipped up and Steve’s father’s face peered beneath.

“Boys,” he sighed. “What’re ya doin’ under the bed?”

“Nothin’,” Bucky lied straight off.

The man didn’t have to say anything in response but to jerk his head and step back for Steve to throw the folding box back into its sachel, push it all back safely into the wall, and crawl out. Bucky followed his lead.

“You know you can just ask if you want to watch a movie,” the man told his son.

“I know,” Steve mumbled down at his feet.

“What were you watching?”

Steve shrugged. “Doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t matter?” the man asked, looking to Bucky. Bucky chewed his lip. “Well, if it doesn’t matter, you two should probably get back to getting that hoverpod back up and running, huh?”

Steve was already taking a step back toward the door. Bucky couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d messed up.

“Was Captain America the good guy?” he blurted.

Steve looked back at him, hopeful, then up at his father.

“So that’s what you were watching,” his father chuckled. “Well, yes, Bucky, I suppose he was.”

“And he was real, right?” Bucky pressed. “Him, and the war from before, and everything?” Everything, that was, that he’d somehow never learned about in History class before.

“Of course,” Steve’s father replied.

“So what happened to him?”

Steve’s father’s smile faded at the question. He looked from one boy to the other and their two perfectly matched sets of wide, expectant eyes.  For a moment, with the way he sighed and pressed his lips together, it looked like he was going to give them another adult non-answer. Then his eyes darted to check the door.

“Depends on who you ask,” he whispered, crouching down to their level. He motioned the boys closer, and they leaned in like flowers to the sun. “The history is lost, mostly,” he continued, “but from what I’ve been told he went down with his airship not a year after that film you saw was made.”

Steve’s jaw dropped open. “But that’s—”

“—Not the whole story,” his father finished for him, holding up a finger. “You remember the voice on the radio, don’t you, Stevie? Now, this was a long time ago—more than thirty years, so not too long before I was even born—but your grandmother was listening to that radio even back then and she heard and she told me that they found Captain America’s ship melting right out of the ice.”

“They did?” Bucky asked, breathless.

“They did,” Steve’s father replied.

“Did they find him?” Steve pressed. “Did they find Captain America?”

“Nope,” his father replied triumphantly. “Big old empty ship full of nothin’. Media had a field day tellin’ everyone it was proof that either he’d never existed, or he abandoned ship back in the Old Order because he knew High Commander Schmidt was right all along.”

“But that’s not true!” Steve protested practically before his father had finished speaking. Tiny hands balled into fists at his sides. “He wouldn’t do that! He was real and he wouldn’t!”

His father didn’t answer him, only smiled and tilted his head like he was waiting for them to piece it together themselves.

Bucky was the first to speak up.

“So...” he figured, face scrunched up so anyone who even looked at him could see the gears turning in his head. “If he _did_ go down with his ship, that means he should’ve by all rights been inside when they found it meltin’.”

“Not unless he melted first!” Steve squawked, and only then did his eyes light up with realization. “He melted first!” he repeated, louder. “He melted first and he got away before the New Order got him!”

Steve’s father smiled and said nothing.

“So he might still be out there!” Steve continued, eyes alight, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “He might be fightin’ the New Order right now!”

Steve might have been too excited to notice, but Bucky caught momentary waver in Steve’s father’s smile. He righted it, but still looked sad somehow.

“That he might,” he said, standing back up. “But the best thing we can do to help him for now is to keep surviving and keep listening, you got that? No heroics. Now,” he rummaged for something in his pocket, and Bucky had just enough time to get excited as to what it could be before he pulled out their broken screwdriver. “Which one of you had this happen to ‘em?”

Bucky looked at Steve. Steve looked at the wall, and the floor, and then very, very cautiously up at his father.

“I ain’t mad,” the man assured him.

Had Bucky been in Steve’s shoes, he wouldn’t have believe him. His father might have been a Delta, and a month ago Bucky probably wouldn’t have even bothered to look in his direction, but in this house he’d quickly learned that Mr. Carter’s word was law.

Right now, his word was, “see this?”

He pointed to the handle of the tool, where the HammerTech logo was starting to fade from the grip. “It’s junk.” He showed it to Bucky, too. “Cheap, sure, and all the more junk for it. I didn’t want to start you boys off on the good stuff cause you might have actually hurt yourselves, but here’s an important life lesson for ya. Both of ya. Listen close, ‘cause I want you to remember this.”

Only when he had their full and complete attention did he take an electromagnetic screwdriver from his own belt and press it into his son’s palm.

“Never forget: when you find yourself in a bind, always turn to Stark.” He said, looking from boy to the other.  “He’s your best friend when you’re in a pinch. You can trust Mr. Stark with your life.”

 

When Bucky dreamed for the first time in years, he had nightmares.

He didn’t know if he had dreamed a lot when he was a child, but when they first began ripping him away from himself, he dreamed a lot. They were horrible dreams, nightmares beyond remembering. Light and dark, blood and bone, metal and bile. For a stretch he had refused to sleep altogether, but the visions eventually found him in his waking hours, too. Phantoms of people he had once known walked the halls of his prison, muttering to him things he didn’t want to believe in a thousand, echoing voices.

Then one day, an unfamiliar voice joined them, clear as a bell.

 _I know what you’re going through_ , she had whispered to him through the bars when no one but the ghosts were around to hear.

He had thought her an illusion at the time, an angel of mercy or of death. And that point, the two could as well have been one in the same. He could no more block her out than he could block out the others. She told him he had to relinquish himself, all of himself, to his deepest reaches. Once he gave himself over, the dreams would stop, as would the pain.

She promised, and desperate, he believed her. After that day, he never dreamed again. Nor did he feel pain, nor cold, nor fear. Even his thoughts were no longer his own. There was nothing. Emptiness. A muffled void.

Until now.

These new dreams were not the nightmares of his childhood. They were so much infinitely worse. Whereas those has been pain and senseless chaos, these played over and over a scene Bucky now knew all too well. The boy made of sunshine was there, as he always was, but he was changed now—bigger and yet not bigger, clearer and yet not clearer. But this time, he did not call to Bucky for help. He did not choke. He did not collapse. He fought, which was the worst thing of all, because he was as helpless as he had always been. He couldn’t save Bucky, and he couldn’t save himself, and Bucky couldn’t move to save either of them.

Over and over again, he watched the light go out. Over and over. Over and over. The AI always went after the boy, no matter how Bucky struggled. He couldn’t stop it, and he couldn’t change it. When he tried to scream, his throat filled with blood. He coughed and struggled at the grip around him. The grip did not loosen, only grunted.

“Well I’ll be damned,” a man’s voice said, as if from the surface of a deep pool.

Bucky’s eyes flew open. He sputtered like a drowned man, but there was no fluid in his lungs. The air tasted of moss and damp, of cold and earth. A great green face peered down at him through his swimming vision. Its head was bent low to avoid knocking against the ceiling of a stone passageway, and its uncanny features were only made more monstrous by the shadows cast on it from a flickering torch somewhere nearby. Bucky’s world swayed from side to side, cradled in the monster’s huge arms like a child. The ground shook with its every lumbering step, and ahead of them, in a sea of stony darkness, stretched a long procession of torches and human figures, shambling on through the subterranean tunnel.

“It’s Bucky, isn’t it?” asked the man’s voice from before. Bucky had to crane his neck to look at him. There was a torch in his hand, but even so his skin was as dark as the stone behind him. “Barton owes me a drink,” he continued with a good-natured laugh. “He swore you were a goner. How you feel?”

Unused to making smalltalk after waking up in captivity, Bucky answered by struggling. It wasn’t much use. The beast’s arms held him firm, and all the effort only served to send a pulsing agony shooting through his head.

“Wow, okay there, take it easy, man,” the man said. “If we wanted to hurt you, don’t you think we would have done it by now? Relax. No immediate danger. Well, except the big guy. No offense,” he added to the green giant. The giant merely grunted again.

Bucky tried to retrace his whereabouts. A cave. He remembered a cave. A cave, and a van, and a room with a bed and...

It slid into place, more solid than before.

“Where’s Steve?” he demanded.

The man with the torch frowned to himself. “He’ll turn up,” he said solemnly. Bucky got the feeling he wasn’t so sure about that either. “There are scouts out looking for other survivors. The rest of us have gotta keep moving. I’m Sam, by the way. We haven’t officially met.”

Bucky craned his neck to look around, but it was too dark to ascertain their whereabouts.

“Where?”

The man waited for him to elaborate. “...Are we?” he finished when Bucky didn’t, then shrugged one shoulder. “Not entirely sure. We’ve been working our way north of SHIELD for a week now. North and east. Word is—”

“No!” Bucky kicked, trying to free himself again. “I need to go back. Steve—they might have taken him. They might have—he could be—”

The beast did not take too kindly to all the struggling. A growl of protest rumbled in its chest and a flicker passed through the entire procession as the whole line suddenly tensed and fell silent at the sound, footsteps growing hushed as they stopped to peer back.

“Let him go,” the man with the torch ordered hurriedly. If Bucky’s instincts hadn’t forced him to twist and catch himself, he could have cracked his head on the ground when the beast dropped him without warning. When he looked up, it had staggered a few steps back and held its face in one hand. The other it held up as Bucky watched, either in reassurance or surrender. The man with the torch was pulling Bucky to his feet and away by his elbow but too quickly, and all Bucky had to do was blink through the world spinning dangerously around him to have to catch himself against the nearest wall. The torches around him were all starting to blur together.

“Easy,” a woman said, but not to him.

Bucky gulped down air until she came enough into focus, her hands hovering over the green giant until it shook its head again and sat with a loud thud against the opposite wall. It wasn’t until she looked over her shoulder at Bucky that her face clicked into place and the world seemed to tilt beneath his feet.

“Not going to be sick, are you?”

Another new voice. Bucky flinched in surprise to realize the man it came from was standing practically beside him. He was another allegedly extinct Epsilon, though with the notable distinction of only having one eye.

Bucky’s instincts told him to take a step back.

“How’s the new head?” the man went on, casual as anything, as if Bucky’s cornered animal posture meant nothing to him. “Heard you cracked it open as soon as Stark finished unscrambling everything inside. Must hurt like a bitch.”

Bucky didn’t take his eyes off him, but his hand unconsciously moved to touch the back of his head. There were syntho-stitches there, sure enough. Someone had cut his hair to get to the wound, but at least they did him the favor of shortening everywhere else, too.

He darted his attention back to the woman, who was merely standing there watching him. He had the vague sense that he should know what to do when she was present, that if he didn’t do as he should then he ought be afraid, to expect pain, but not from her. The details were on the tip of his tongue. The Labs, the dreams, the woman with the red hair.

“Steve,” he said instead.

“If Schmidt’s people are smart, and I know they are, he’s not dead yet,” the one-eyed man interrupted. “The serum we gave him is too valuable. They won’t waste it by killing the hos—.”

“— _You_ gave him?”

The mourning would take time to sink in; anger was infinitely quicker. Bucky had the one-eyed man by the throat before he even made the decision to move. He heard more than saw the guns suddenly trained on him, but some deep instinct told him that he could disarm all three before they ever got off a shot.

“You killed him is what you did!” he growled, an inch from the man’s face. “You pumped him full of false hope and _poison_!”

Bucky could have snapped his neck with one hand. He _knew_ he could. He didn’t know how he knew, but his fingers did. The one-eyed man didn’t seem overly phased by the very real prospect, nor even by the sudden shift in Bucky’s demeanor. Perhaps it was because he saw the woman approach before Bucky ever got the chance. He didn’t hear her, not until she had her hand on his synthetic wrist. The threat in that gesture was instinctual, though again Bucky had no idea why.

“We also saved his life,” she told him. “The Labs are going to do everything in their power to keep him alive. That buys us time. Let go.”

He fixed his gaze right on her. The anger was bubbling rancid and hot in his chest, but still she looked at him without an ounce of fear, like he was little more than a misbehaving child.

“Let go,” she repeated. Out of spite, he tightened his grip.

The shock was instantaneous. Lights burst behind Bucky’s eyes where there had once been pain sensors as his entire arm went slack. He clutched it and stumbled back just as the one-eyed man did the same. Bucky watched as he rubbed his throat and cracked his neck. He didn’t look harmed, but at least he now watched Bucky a little more warily.

“Thank you,” he said to the woman, who nodded in response. The corner of Bucky’s mouth twitched in satisfaction at the rasp in his voice. The feeling was starting to return to his arm, albeit slowly.

“Romanoff’s right,” he went on. Bucky frowned; that didn’t sound the way it should. “We need all the time we can get to regroup. You’re looking at what’s left of SHIELD.” He gestured around the rocky corridor. Judging by the torches Bucky could see, there couldn’t have been more than two or three hundred people. “Most of these people are Epsilon refugees. Plenty of them are children, elderly, infirm. We don’t exactly have manpower to spare.”

“Mounting a rescue mission into the heart of Metro 11 at this point is suicide,” the woman added.

Not Romanoff, Romanova. Natalia. Bucky knew he knew her face. The memories were starting to trickle back, bit by disjointed bit. The parts with Steve were clear; everything thereafter, not so much.

His face soured. “Then I’ll go alone,” he snarled. “You all have already done enough damage, and I’ve got first-hand experience with what it’s like when the Labs _want_ to keep you alive. It’s hell, as you might remember.”

He looked at Natalia as he said it, but her face was set in stone. The calm was infuriating.

“In that case _when_ we get Steve back, we’ll have to tell him you died on a fool’s errand,” she said.

“Better than running away and abandoning him to suffer under their thumb alone,” he spat at her, louder than he meant to. “That’s still how you operate, isn’t it?”

Her eyes widened slightly, and Bucky knew he’d struck a nerve. Apparently, so did the one-eyed man.

“That’s enough,” he said. The words were quiet, but carried so much authority he may as well have shouted them. “It will take another few days for your concussion to heal,” he told Bucky. “In that time, we’ll have arrived at our satellite base and have the manpower to spare for a small rescue op. If you wait until then, we will lend you our support.”

Bucky gave the consideration a moment’s pause. His head still spun whenever he turned it, and even he knew that was no fit condition to travel in alone if he could help it. Underground was safe from sky patrols, but without a map or a guide or all of his wits he’d be helpless.

“What’s in it for you?” he asked after a moment's consideration.

“Steve is one of us now,” the man answered simply. “We look after our own.”

 _This what you call looking after your own?_ Bucky wanted to say. Instead he smiled.

“Then I guess I’m waiting,” he lied.

Everyone bought it but Natalia.

She caught him hours later, when the caravan stopped for what on the surface must have constituted nighttime. He’d managed to knock out the posted lookouts without incident, and armed himself quickly and lightly. The whole thing was like moving in a dream; he didn’t know how to fight until his muscles reacted on their own. There was no source of their knowledge, as if it had always and would always exist. It was like instinct, much the same way it was instinct to freeze at the sound of the crackle of electricity that ran down Natalia’s arms when she stood in his way.

“I thought I taught you better than getting caught,” she said, an amused smile on her lips. “Where do you think you’re going?”

She would have to be an idiot not to know the answer, and he knew well enough she wasn’t. So he said nothing at all. It had the desired effect.

“You think I’m here to stop you,” she guessed. She wasn’t wrong, but he didn’t care to say as much either. “I’m not. Relax. I’m coming with you.”

“The hell you are,” he hissed through his teeth.

“And why not?”

She was trying to rile him up, he could feel it, but he had no choice but to keep his voice low. “Why would I let you?”

She cocked her head. “I wasn't under the impression I was giving you a choice.”

“Why?” he repeated, but this time it was a different question. “Why would you want to come?”

Her fox-grin sobered. “I remember what it’s like, just like you do.”

“No, not just like me.” He’d never get away if he fired a gun and woke the entire procession, but there was a knife on his belt, just within reach. “You  _left_. Without me.” His voice cracked. “I thought you were on my side. You said you understood.”

He felt every bit the child he was, left completely alone to untold horrors by the one person he thought he could trust. He swallowed and went on. “They told me you _died_ . Was this where you’ve been the whole time? Were you  _buying time_ to come save me too?”

“James—”

“I don’t want to hear it!” he snapped. Some distance away, someone stirred. Bucky bit his tongue.

“James,” she said again, softly. “I know it must have been hard, but I had no choice. If I didn’t take my chance at escape with Clint back there, neither of us would be free today. You have to understand.”

“Where is he now, if he’s so special?” Bucky asked bitterly.

“I need a pair of eyes in SHIELD,” she replied. If Bucky didn’t know better, he’d think she hadn’t caught the note of jealousy in his voice. On the contrary, she was blatantly ignoring it. “He doesn’t know I’m leaving yet, but he’ll understand. Besides, this is something only we can do. Together. You don’t know the Red Room’s security like I do, and they’ll have it tightest around Steve. You need me on this.”

Bucky’s eyebrows furrowed. “How much security could they possibly need for one dying Epsilon?”

“That one is going to take some explaining, ” Natalia admitted, “but a lot more than you’d expect. I’ll tell you on the way.”

“I still haven’t agreed to let you come,” Bucky reminded her.

“What’s the alternative?” she asked. “Let me stay here with absolutely no incentive to keep my mouth shut? You’re working off nothing but muscle memory. Everything you knew once, I taught you. I can teach you again. You go alone, we’ll catch you within a day.”

“I could just kill you,” Bucky pointed out, as casually as if he were pointing out the weather. His own tone frightened him. As much as his anger for this woman roiled in his gut, he couldn't conceive of himself as capable of murder. 

“You think so?” she smiled. This was a game to her. “Why don’t you give it a try?”

Some dark part of Bucky considered it, and that scared him more than any threat Natalia could make. Delirious though they were, his memories of her rescuing him and Steve were some of the clearest he had. She’d saved Steve’s life after he’d endangered it. That, if nothing else, was worth something. A chance.

He took his hand off the knife’s handle.

With a nod, she agreed to these terms.

Their absence was not discovered until morning, the supplies they took not until four days later. Their course was set for Metro 11.

 

They weren’t able to cover as much ground as he would like as quickly as he would have liked it. Not only did the tunnels twist and turn without end, but his head injury was intent on not cooperating with the grueling pace he set for them. Natalia never commented. She quickly picked up on the fact that he didn’t want to talk. He caught himself being grateful to her for that, before he remembered he was supposed to be livid.

Even as his wound healed, everything still felt dream-like. Traveling with Natalia was like falling into an old routine. On their first night, she caught him watching intently as she assembled and reassembled the weapons they had taken.

“You’re staring,” she pointed out.

“It’s like replaying a game I haven’t picked up since I was little,” he muttered absently, never taking his eyes off the way her hands flickered this way and that. Every movement was one he only knew was coming after he saw it done, at which point it became perfectly obvious.

“Memories without memories,” she replied.

He nodded, slowly. “Exactly.”

After that they started talking, however briefly. When she eventually told him what Steve was, he laughed in her face. She didn’t even smile.

“You’re serious?” he asked. She was. “But how can that be? Steve can’t—that’s fairy tales.”

“So’s the Winter Soldier,” she pointed out. In the time Bucky took to rub his arm and form together a rebuttal, she added, “I’ll explain how circumstances came to be what they were once we have Steve back. I have a feeling he doesn’t know the half of it either.”

Bucky had to agree with that last part. He might not have lived in Steve’s house quite as long as Steve had, but even he could tell his parents were just people. Good, ordinary people. Steve’s father was a Delta mechanic. There wasn’t a bone in his body that would give him away as even the most remote of relatives to a legendary hero.

“For now,” Natalia went on, “what’s important is that the New Order believes Steve is Captain Rogers’s descendant. That’s the kind of security we’ll be dealing with. Shouldn’t be easy, but working together we’ll manage just fine.”

“How are you going to reteach me everything I need to know in a week?” Bucky thought to ask. The notion had been troubling him. Given a real fight, he wasn’t sure his instincts could carry him through quite as easily as they had on a few unsuspecting, unarmed guards.

“The .mem files may be gone, but the neural pathways are still there,” Natalia replied. “You’ll make new memories, rebuild. It’ll be like riding a bike.”

The irony of finding themselves moving through the same motions on the other side of the conflict was something to behold. Bucky shook his head and coughed up a chuckle.

“Guess we’ll see,” he said to the cold reactor they’d set up for light in between them. He was mostly joking, but just as Natalia had once helped him integrate a slew of memories that were not his own, over the course of the next few days she coached him through every bit of knowledge that popped into her head. She taught him how to fight. How to aim. How to keep his weapons clean. How to assess a situation and find the best angle to tackle it from. How to pick his vantage point. How to spot a lie.

He didn’t so much remember as learn it all at an impossible pace. One repetition was all it took for the knowledge to stick, and when she had him practice, his body knew the steps all on its own. Sooner or later, it proved easier to trust her than to not. Besides, she was right; neither of them could force their way into the Labs alone. Without each other, they wouldn’t have even gotten through the first city checkpoint.

The plan was one they had accomplished so many times before, neither of them had much use for discussing it. They key difference this time around was dodging sky patrols once the tunnel they had been traveling along broke the surface. Silent and cloaked, the patrol drones were damn near impossible to spot if one didn’t know how to look for the little shimmer they left behind in the air. But once one was gone, Bucky and Natalia knew they had a few precious moments of secrecy to pass unnoticed before the next one.

Just like old times, Natalia flagged down the car and Bucky snuck around the other side. The two Betas they managed to surprise would be found within the hour by passing patrols, sleeping peacefully, albeit in their underclothes, by the side of the road. It was more than enough time for Natalia and Bucky to pass into the city in their stolen vehicle. Betas were afforded many special privileges, not the least of which was being able to fly within city limits to pass Gamma traffic, and bypass the most tedious of the security.

It wasn’t Bucky’s first time seeing Metro 11 from the air, but it was his first in twenty years. He’d been a child the last time he’d seen it, and back then he’d seen it every day on his way to and from the Academy. On his last trip, before life as he knew it changed irrevocably, he probably hadn’t even spared the view a glance.

Now his eyes stayed glued to the window as the car drove itself neatly through toward the business district and underground into a garage. He didn’t tear his eyes from the last sliver of sky until it was completely out of sight.

Once underground, his eyes reluctantly turned in search of security cameras. When he stepped out the car, his hand was already hidden in his pocket.

“You’re a Beta,” Natalia coached as she strode past for the elevator. “You know exactly where you’re going, you’re not under any time pressure to get there, and no one will dare question you or stand in your way. Chin up.”

Bucky followed her onto the platform, but when he went to push the button for the ground floor, the edges of the touch screen glass lit up red.

“Figures,” he mumbled. It was fingerprint secured.

“Let me,” Natalia said, nudging past him. The screen went red for her, too, but with a spark from her finger and a frantic beeping noise from the elevator, they were suddenly moving for the ground floor.

The doors opened into the lobby of an office building. No one tried to stop them on their way out the front door, or spared them a glance when all they did was walk to the edge of the street and pretend to examine a parking pay meter.

“If you have a suggestion as to how to get to the other side of town,” Natalia whispered, “now would be the time.”

Bucky looked around. He didn’t recognize the street, but he knew the business district from the industrial sector. The car dropped them about as far as possible from their target, which put walking out of the question. Between the checkpoints they’d passed and the security in the garage noting their faces in a stolen car, even wearing Beta uniforms they they wouldn’t make it thirty blocks. Buses, taxis, and subways all required credits they didn’t have, because the second they would try to scan in, the database would either find him an Epsilon or with no file at all. Or worse, it would find him a wanted fugitive.

Then again, maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.

Smiling, he offered Natalia his arm.

“Why don’t we figure it out over a drink?” he suggested.

Natalia’s brow furrowed. “It’s a little early for a drink.”

“I’m a Beta. I know exactly where I'm going,” Bucky echoed with a wink. Whether it was that or the fact that he was still standing there in the street offering his arm, Natalia relented.

“Lead the way,” she said through a smile, threading her arm through his. She didn’t sound thoroughly convinced but she could certainly sell it to anyone looking.

Bucky wasn’t picky about the bar. He held the door into the first one they found open. Natalia walked straight past the scanner at the door without touching it.

“We won’t be drinking,” she explained to the bartender in Gamma green, just as two steps behind her, Bucky scanned himself in. “Scratch that,” she smiled, though it looked more like a grimace. “ _I_ won’t be drinking.”

The scanner immediately lit up white, for Epsilon. Where an ID would normally be displayed, the screen presented a large letter E beside the words CLEARANCE NEEDED: GAMMA and  IDENTITY NOT FOUND. Bucky pointed an accusing finger at the readout.

“What’s the meaning of this?” he demanded.

If there was one thing Natalia didn’t have to reteach him, it was how to scowl. He probably didn’t even have to be dressed like a Beta to make the bartender quake in her boots.

“I– I don’t know,” she squeaked. “It must be malfunctioning. I’m terribly sorry.”

She looked so terrified Bucky almost felt bad. He could practically see the disapproving look Steve would give him for this. It was the same one he gave him when he once caught Bucky pulling his sister’s pigtails.

Suddenly guilty, he shrugged and waved the apology off.

“Don’t sweat it,” he said, voice softening, as he approached the bar and took a seat. Natalia followed his example, though the disapproving look she shot him out of the corner of her eye as she took the seat beside him made it obvious his change of heart was transparent at best.

“You can make it up to me by getting me an adrenaline,” he said, ignoring her and speaking to the bartender instead. “Solid. Make it a double. And a steak for the lady, bloody.”

The bartender’s eyes darted to the scanner behind them. Bucky could see the entirety of her internal struggle over whether to say something play out on her face.

“Please, doll?” he said before she could, leaning forward on his elbows. “S’been a long couple of days. I won’t tell if you won’t.”

He offered her a smile, and that appeared to seal the deal.

“Coming up,” she said, clearly unsure if she’s allowed to smile. Her face was quite pink as she reached under the counter and slid a steak knife wrapped in a napkin to Natalia. She continued to steal glances Bucky’s way as she passed on the order.

“We don’t have more than two minutes before the EPs come to bust down the door after your little error report back there,” Natalia whispered when she was out of earshot. Bucky had only looked away one second to confirm the other patrons were few and harmless, and the steak knife had already disappeared somewhere into Natalia’s clothing. “I get that they’re our ride, but we’re going to need more than your pretty face to lose them again.”

“They’ll only send enough men to apprehend one,” Bucky reasoned as the girl came around with a glass of water and two small pills. Her thanked her and turned back to Natalia. “As long as we’re gentle with them as they take us in, they won’t need to call for backup and we can catch them by surprise.”

He rolled the pills into his hand and dropped one under his tongue. The other he pushed into Natalia’s hand under the counter.

“Soon as we’re through the Labs’ front gates,” he explained.

Natalia didn’t look half as impressed with the plan as he thought she would. Instead she glanced around, pulled a lipstick tube from her stolen handbag, and reached for the nearest napkin. Once the pill is under her tongue, she leaned in close and begins to scribble.

“Listen carefully and remember everything I say,” she hissed with urgency that stood in contrast with her normal cool demeanor. Bucky couldn’t take his eyes off how quickly she was able to write by hand. On the napkin, she made two columns of seemingly random words. “If you hear one of the Crossbones say any of these,” she pointed to the column closest him. “You drop down and pretend to be out cold. You may not have your programming anymore, but as long as _they_ don’t know that, you have the upper hand. If you hear any of these,” she pointed to the second list, “I’m the one out of commission, and I won’t be pretending. If you need to go and I’m not responding, you _leave me behind_. Is that clear?”

Bucky studied Natalia and then the list again from behind a frown.

“But you’re not...” he began at last, eyes going to where the hair covered the back of her neck. She smoothed down her hair, perhaps subconsciously.

“You don’t need to be plugged to be reprogrammed,” she said, even quieter. “In the Labs, your place and mine weren’t so different. Do you have these memorized?”

He nodded, and just in time. In the same instance that the doors burst open behind them, Natalia shoved the napkin into his water glass. Bucky had just enough time to turn around in his seat and be offended that they’d only sent six Alphas to subdue him when she grabbed the front of his shirt and one-handed, heaved him over the bar.

For a second after hitting the ground, he was too stunned to move. He sat up just as she was vaulting over to join him, with a spray of gunfire not far behind. Between the breaking bottles and someone not far off screaming, they couldn’t have stopped to chat if they wanted to, and with all the broken glass raining down on them, they couldn’t exactly stay where they were.

Bucky darted left, Natalia right. When he tried to fire back he found his gun was laser-powered—great for never running out of ammo, but easily jammable by the right frequency. A jammer would explain why there were only six guys. At least he had his knives, and he knew Natalia had at least one, and the ammo the enemy was using probably wasn’t lethal. Probably. Bucky was banking on not having to find out.

He scuttled his way to the edge of the bar and waited. The first guy to come close to him got a blade to the gut and another to the throat, and with his dead weight as cover, Bucky charged the next nearest two, who made his job easy by firing at each other when he got in between them. He ducked, rolled, and yanked the legs out from the one with the deadlier aim, elbowing the gun from his hand on the way up and lodging the first shot in its owner. Now armed, he scanned the room for his partner in time to see her leap from the bar and onto an EP’s shoulders, squeeze his head between her thighs, and execute a perfect cartwheel over the sound of snapping vertebrae. The crackle of electricity charged the air as she turned to her next target, lightening zipping down her arms, but he was as well prepared as she’d anticipated.

The word he spoke through his mask intercom sounded foreign. From across the room, Bucky couldn’t even tell which of Natalia’s list it was. All he knew was that it had to be one of them, because as soon the Alpha spoke it she crumpled where she stood. A wordless cry ripped from Bucky’s throat as his attempt to fire at the man was cut short by another Alpha wrenching his hand off-target.

“Sputnik,” the man said, as if it was supposed to make the slightest lick of sense. For half a second, it didn’t. In that half second, Bucky hesitated. He must have looked confused, because the EP’s brows furrowed too.

He was expecting something. That was enough to clue Bucky off. The loathing coiling in his throat was very tempting in its offer to elbow this man under the jaw and take out the rest of his friends, but it wasn’t in the plan. Bucky might not have been able to hold back the venom from his glare, but he could crumple to the floor. Reluctantly.

He bit his tongue when the man above him nudged him in the ribs with his boot.

“Stand down,” the Alpha said, presumably into his OmniComm. His foot was planted warm and inviting between Bucky’s shoulder blades. “Suspect has been detained.” The man paused, and, Bucky would like to imagine if he could open his eyes, looked warily to what remains of his compatriots. “We also have Romanova.”

The other half of the conversation could evidently only be heard inside the EP’s helmets. Bucky used this borrowed time to slow his breathing, so that when someone finally reached down to check for his pulse, they found it calm and slow. Then, following orders he could not hear, they cuffed him and hauled him out into the street.

For a city, it had certainly gone eerily quiet. He couldn’t even hear traffic. If they’d really shut down half the city to apprehend him, he was honestly flattered. Mostly though, he was glad to be able to count footsteps. By the time he and Natalia were thrown into the back of an EP van, Bucky was fairly confident without opening his eyes that there were eight men total in the back with them.

The vehicle drove itself, naturally. As part of the EP fleet, it had clearance to fly above even Beta traffic. This was another boon in Bucky’s favor; as soon as he felt the wheels touch down, he knew it was time to strike.

No one had thought to check if a man presumed unconscious had tensed his arms while they restrained him—thus leaving himself a half inch of wiggle room to escape—nor had they thought to check for an adrenaline capsule under his tongue. By the time the truck came to a stop in the arrival bay, there was only one man left standing to kick open the doors.

Bucky looked down at the momentarily stunned docking crew. They were certainly armed to escort two dangerous fugitives, and there were a lot more than eight of them. This was going to be one tough fight.

He took in a steadying breath before it started. It dawned on him that he, himself, in his own right mind, had never done this before alone. On the other hand, he thought as he exhaled, there was a first time for everything.

“So," he said with bravado he didn't have, "which one of you is going to point me to where you fucks are keeping Steve?”

The answer was none of them. If Bucky didn’t know better, he’d think they were actually offended he asked. At any rate, he didn’t get the luxury of asking any more questions once the first gun went off and the room went to mayhem.

In a way he was glad his body knew more of what it was doing than his head. At times he could hardly keep track of the fighting. It was easier to let his muscles react on their own before he could make sense of what was about to happen. When he was left with a roomful of bodies and an alarm ringing in his ears, all he could do is stop for a moment to marvel at his own handiwork and catch his breath.

Then it was time to move again.

He had maybe thirty seconds to get a head start. He had no idea where he going, or what his plan was when he got there. Unlike Natalia, he never walked these halls alert and unescorted. His idea hitched on her as his guide.

He looked back to the van. As expected, she didn’t emerge miraculously to show him the way. Pressed for time as he was, with a critical mission at hand, he really should leave her. If anyone could fend for themselves, it was the Black Widow. She’d find a way. Besides, she’d abandoned him once at the mercy of these very monsters without so much as a goodbye. She deserved it.

Bucky didn’t really believe that. He didn’t even need Steve gnawing at his conscience to believe it. One step for the door and he was turning around to sprint into the back of the van again and find the guy whose fingerprint unlocked her handcuffs. He even had the sense to grab a laser firearm tuned to the EP’s frequencies. If they were going to disarm him remotely again, they’d be disarming themselves, too. With that on his belt and Natalia in his arms, he emerged once again right back where he started, now with even less time to figure out where to go.

Theoretically, he’d be able to carry both Natalia and Steve if he needed to. Hell, she probably weighed more than Steve did, especially considering he'd have been wasting away over the past two weeks. That plan wouldn’t leave him much room to fight though. One way or another, he’d have to leave her somewhere. At least he’d be the bigger person and do it somewhere safe.

The only safe place in sight was a storage locker.

“Sorry,” he whispered as he stuffed her unceremoniously inside. “I’ll be back.”

At his own words, he hesitated. It wasn’t until he said it aloud that it dawned on him. It was possible, and not even all that entirely unlikely, that Natalia had once whispered the same words to him. It could have merely been a matter of circumstances that didn’t allow her to keep her word.

A nice dream, perhaps, but the reality remained. She abandoned him.

All the more reason to show her up by coming back.

 

In his sparingly-lit workshop, Howard Stark sat back from his workbench and scratched at the shadow forming around his jaw. Under ordinary circumstances he would have never let himself get so unkempt, but these were not exactly ordinary times. It had been nearly seven months since the Resistance lost its one and only leg to stand on, but he was closer than ever to his breakthrough. Captain Rogers may be dead, but he didn’t have to be forever.

Or, well, Captain _America_ didn’t have to be dead forever. No, that wasn’t quite right either.

Howard pulled a test tube from the incubator and started to prep another slide. All this DNA cutting and cell farming had never been his cup of tea. Early on in his project, he’d wasted months trying to create a robot to do the busywork for him, but in the end it was a matter of things being done right, and for that he had to do the work himself.

Even so, teaching himself genetic engineering had not easy, especially when mainstream science seemed to have accepted that it hadn’t successfully been done before in humans. As far as Howard was concerned, Captain Rogers was not only proof that it had, but the key to doing it again.

If only the Labs hadn’t managed to lose the body.

That no one had Captain America’s remains was probably the most dangerous piece of information Howard Stark had stored in all his drives and backups, and that included all the Old Order research he’d stolen to help him drive this project off the ground. Over the course of the Uprisings, he had found himself in the awkward position of being a double agent between the Resistance and the New Order. The latter funded all scientific research in the world, but the former, well...

Howard didn’t make all his friendships public. God knows the scandal if he did; it would clog up the news cycle for months.

Call him a schmuck. Maybe the speeches got to him. All he knew was that he knew a good man when he saw one, and Captain Rogers was a good man. A mad one, but as his own father liked to say, he didn’t have to like him to like him. And Howard liked him, which is why it was all the more frustrating when a week after the assassination, the New Order thought the Resistance took him, the Resistance thought the New Order was hiding his remains somewhere for research, and no one— _no one_ —seemed to have any clue of what became of his body in the end, all the while refusing to admit it.

Of course to reveal that he knew about all this, Howard would have to admit to both parties that he was privy to both their secrets. He wasn’t ready to show all those cards to anybody just yet. Without a body, all he had to work with were the documents of how it was made. Considering they were penned years before the discovery of even the double-helix, they were a nightmare to decypher. He should have given up months ago. Not telling anyone meant he had only his own genes to work with, and even though that gave him all the right building blocks, piecing them together from scratch would take a decade at least. But if it meant that Captain Rogers didn’t die for nothing, it would all be a small sacrifice by comparison.

The time it would take to finish was about to be cut down to months. The arrival of the key to Howard Stark’s breakthrough was heralded by the sound of breaking glass upstairs. If it wasn’t so silent in his lab, he wouldn’t have even heard it.

“Jarvis?” he called without looking up from his work. “What did you break this time?”

The virtual intelligence said nothing. This in itself was more worrisome than the broken glass.

Slowly, very slowly, Howard set down his slide. It was sure to be a dud anyway.

“Jarvis?” he called again. Nothing, or maybe footsteps. It was hard to tell. As far as Howard knew, he was alone in the house.

His first thought was to glance around for weapons. There were plenty, if his aim was to take out the entire eastern seaboard. Ruling those out, his best bet was a tentacled pistol he’d never quite gotten to work. It was that or a wrench. He picked the eldritch gun, which now that he thought about it, might have actually been a blender.

Thus armed and feeling utterly foolish, Howard crept up the stairs. He didn’t get around the corner before he found a real gun pointed at his face. His instinct was naturally to drop his weapon and surrender immediately. He was lucky his would-be attacker lowered hers as well.

“Howard!” she gasped. “Oh my god, Howard, you’re alive!”

Howard recognized her voice before she stepped into the light. He was almost as surprised to see her as she was to see him. Actually, more so.

“Sharon?” he gaped.

One of the few women whose faces he could put a name to without thinking; talk about a surprise. Sharon Carter hadn’t been seen by anybody since the fall of the helicarriers. So many lost their lives that day, no one had thought twice. Even Captain Rogers came within an inch of death. He'd barely had time to mourn her before the New Order took him into custody.

Compared to how Howard remembered her, she looked ghastly. She may as well have spent the last year in a sewer and without any sleep. Her yellow hair had been reduced to a dingy brown, and what color her clothes had originally been was anyone’s guess. She’d vanished long before the color coding of the castes started. More startling than the filth or the smell, however, was the protrusion of her abdomen through her many layers. It was like nothing Howard had ever seen. She seemed to need to support it with one hand.

“This is good actually,” she said, holstering her gun. “Listen, sorry about disabling your security and breaking your window. Time’s almost up.”

“Up?” Howard repeated, tearing his eyes from her stomach. “What time? Why’s it up?”

“Haven’t you been uplinking the news?” Sharon sighed, and pushed him aside to get down the stairs. “We have less than three hours until the surveillance drones launch.”

It seemed to require a great deal of effort for her to descend the steps, even taking one foot one stair at a time. The old banister groaned with how much weight she put on it, and from the way she sucked air through her teeth, the effort must have hurt, too.

“Are you alright?” Howard thought to ask, trailing behind her.

“Been better,” she groaned.

At the bottom of the stairs she had to stop for a rest to catch her breath and wipe a sheen of sweat from her forehead. All Howard could do was watch. Someone had to tell her. He hated to be the one to do it.

“You’re really not alright,” he said. He was hovering, a little afraid to touch her.

She shot him a nasty glare over her shoulder. “I’ve noticed!” she snapped, and blew a loose strand of ratty hair from her eyes.

Her efforts to catch her breath weren’t helping.  One second she was fine, and the next she was doubled over with a gasp as her knees buckled beneath her. It was her hand still on the banister that kept her from collapsing completely. “It’s been happening for two days. It can wait,” she panted when the episode passed as suddenly as it came. “The drones won’t. You have a direct connection to the Metro 11 Labs’ data centers, don’t you?”

“Sure I do,” Howard shrugged. “What does that have to do with—what drones?”

“I need—a DDoS attack will buy us time, hopefully delay the launch,” Sharon continued. “I have it mostly written in my— _ah_ , in my jack. I just need an uplink to finish it and—”

With a strangled groan, she doubled over again. This time, Howard thought to catch her.

“Jarvis!” he called, on the verge of panic with a seemingly dying woman in his arms. “Call an ambulance!”

He scarcely got the order out before Sharon’s hand latched onto his collar.

“Don’t you dare,” she hissed. “Can’t you see how important this is? If the New Order’s updated surveillance system launches, Steve taking down those helicarriers would have been for nothing. He would have _died_ for nothing.”

“You’re about to die for even less,” Howard squawked. It took all his strength to haul Sharon back to her feet. Even then he had to half-carry her to a chair. “What did you do to Jarvis?”

“Just jammed his processes a little. Reboot, he’ll live,” she sighed as she fell more than sat on the chair offered to her and wiped loose hairs from her sticky face. “I need an uplink.”

Against his better judgement, knowing Sharon’s wrath, Howard shook his head.

“I can’t let you,” he said, backing up to lean against a command console. “They’ll see where the DDoS attack came from in a hot second. They’ll be here for us in two. My reputation will be ruined.”

It was definitely the wrong thing to say.

“Your _reputation_?” Sharon exploded. “Is that all you care about, you selfish, arrogant _splice_?” Her grip on her abdomen tightened and for a moment her face flickered in pain, but her eyes never stopped burning a hole through Howard’s skull.

Howard didn’t say anything in response. He didn’t say anything because he was too busy typing his reboot password into the keyboard on the console behind his back.

“You got me,” he shrugged when he couldn’t hold her stare a second longer. “Never been much good at this whole saving the world thing. I had my money on you guys doing that.”

“We still _can_ ,” Sharon growled.

Howard, for his part, almost seemed to be considering it. The look of relief that washed across her face when Howard pulled a data jack from the wall almost made him feel bad for what he was about to do.

He watched her plug it in, and then looked to the corner where a red light was blinking on the wall. When the light turned steady, Howard cleared his throat.

“Jarvis,” he said. “Run diagnostics on the good Mrs. Rogers here.”

Sharon’s eyes widened in horror. He hadn’t given her a datajack with an internet connection. It was a private line to the house. In the same instant that she reached back to disconnect herself, Howard stepped forward and held the plug in place. The scars from where she sank her teeth into his arm in retaliation would be visible for the rest of his life.

“It’s for your own good,” he told her as Jarvis read out a list of imbalanced hormones.

She growled something from behind his arm in response. Howard felt it was safe to assume that it was vulgar. Lucky for him, she didn’t have enough strength left to fight him. He turned to the ceiling.

“Just give me the short answer,” he ordered.

“By my assessment, Miss Carter is nearing the end of the first stage of labor,” Jarvis replied.

Howard was so surprised, had Sharon not been similarly stunned she would have been able to escape his grip.

“As in... _childbirth_?”

“That’s impossible,” Sharon spat. “I’m regulated!”

Howard could see his own blood on her teeth. His arm stung something awful. She was right though, it was impossible. Every woman had a hormone chip implanted under their arm in preadolescence specifically to stop this kind of thing. They were completely foolproof. Who would want to spend months with a human parasitically feeding off their innards when they could drop a few cells off at a lab and have themselves a healthy child? No one, that’s who. There hadn’t been a natural birth on official records in at least a century.

“Your chip has been inactive for three hundred and thirty-nine days due to electrical damage,” Jarvis informed them both.

“Electrical damage?” Howard thought aloud. “Wouldn’t you remember getting electrocuted hard enough to short out implants?”

Sharon’s mouth fell open, though maybe that was in pain again.

“On the helicarrier,” she realized, gasping, “the redhead,” and then doubled over again with a gurgle of agony.  

“Help me out here, Jarvis,” Howard screamed over her.

“No,” Sharon gasped, clutching his wrist hard enough to cut off circulation. “We have to hold it off. The launch won’t wait.”

“I’m afraid it is not safe for you to wait any longer either,” Jarvis cut in. “The only way to delay delivery at this stage is to increase your adrenaline, which is already dangerously high. Your chance of survival would be 74%. Your son’s would be 12%.”

“My son’s?” Sharon repeated weakly. Her grip loosened. Then, of all things, she chuckled. “Damn it.”

Howard must have looked very panicked and confused indeed. He couldn’t think of what else she would find amusing enough to smile at at a time like this. He waited for her to say something, anything. He’d never been struck so speechless in his life.

“They’ll take him if they find us, won’t they?” she said at last.

Howard answered with a look even more befuddled than the last.

Sharon laughed again and shook her head. For a long time she was quiet, then she made a noise that sounded like a hiccup, followed by another grimace of pain.

“Fuck,” she said, and burst into tears.

It was to be a long night. Howard would trade a lot of things to wipe it from his memory. For one thing, he finally did the one thing he promised himself he would never do, which was to shove his desk clean so as to make room for a woman. Even Howard Stark had standards. Alas, to the floor his research went.

For another thing, if he thought teaching himself genetic engineering in a matter of months was a feat worth bragging about, having to learn obstetrics in a matter of hours from the virtual intelligence that ran his home was somewhat more difficult. Howard was happy to say he only passed out twice.

At several points during this very long night, he figured they could have safely launched the DDoS just fine, since the Labs could probably hear Sharon screaming from where they were. As it was, they were too busy bringing the New Order into a new age. Gone were the helicarriers that marked the beginning of its reign. Gone was the brief age of remote surveillance. From this night onward, the people of Earth would be watched by a fleet of cloaked drones. There would be no bringing them down easily. It was a terrifying new world, and it was the only one little James Rogers would ever know.

The first thing Sharon said to her newborn son when she took him in his arms was, “I’m sorry.”

Howard, covered in blood up to his elbows and not at all impressed that the kid had lungs as strong as his mother, collapsed into the first chair he found and did his best to lighten the mood.

“This is going to be awkward to explain to his Y donor.”

“Would be,” Sharon replied distantly as she wiped the afterbirth from her son’s eyes. “If I hadn’t done as he asked and shot him.”

Somehow, after all that, the situation hadn’t yet clicked together in Howard’s mind. With that, he finally understood.

“That’s Captain America’s son,” he said stupidly.

“He’s _my_ son,” Sharon corrected without looking up.

“Yes, but—”

“He’s my son,” Sharon repeated. “He _can’t_ be Steve’s, don’t you understand? If anyone knew they would either kill him, use him as a weapon, or both.” At last she looked up at Howard with tired, pleading eyes. “No one can know. Please, Howard. Please, don’t tell anyone.”

Howard swallowed. This felt like something he should think about, but he already knew the answer was easy. He raised his hands in surrender.

“S’far as I know, I just witnessed a virgin birth,” he promised. “You got my word, I won’t tell a soul. You want me to plug him? I got the parts.”

“Thank you,” Sharon breathed, and in what must have been days, her eyes fluttered shut. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me,” Howard grumbled as he stripped his rubber gloves and pulled on clean ones. “Please don’t.”

He might not have Captain Rogers’s DNA, but lying on his table was the next best thing: his son’s placenta. A plug could wait a day or so, if one minded not knowing why the baby was wailing at any given moment; organic material like this could not.

Howard proved to be better at keeping his own secrets, albeit only marginally. Sharon’s he only managed to keep to himself for a little over twenty-five years.

 

Overloading the generator was more or less an accident. In the moment, it seemed like a complete disaster because it gave Bucky an even tighter time limit in which to search the building for Steve, but in retrospect he would admit it eased their escape. _Finding_ the man wasn't in itself all that difficult when all was said and done. Natalia had been right; security around him was top notch. It was only a matter of following the massive locked doors, hordes of security droids, and the red letters RR anywhere they appeared on the posted signage.

When Bucky did finally find him, _well._

He'd like to say he wasn't certain. He'd like to say he hesitated to accept what he saw. He was in the Labs after all, where he couldn't be certain what was real and what was a trick and what was a lie hardwired into his head. But the fact of the matter was that he didn't doubt Steve for a second. Before he could question that he moved like Steve or talked like Steve, he was convinced and ready to tear into whoever had dared dress him in Epsilon. And kissing him? Well, it felt just as right now as it did all those years ago, only a thousand times better.

Although they made it outside in time not to die in a fiery explosion, they were still far from breathing a sigh of relief. Bucky ground to a halt when the emergency descent vehicles were within sight.

“I'll catch up,” he called after Steve, who was already well ahead of him.

The ground gave another lurch. The generator wasn't going to keep the Labs up in the air much longer.

Steve stopped running too. “What?” he said, but over the noise Bucky could only know that by reading his lips.

“I gotta get Natalia,” he yelled as he started back for the building. “You go! Go!”

Steve, of course, didn’t. He caught up with Bucky faster than anyone had a right to, and very evidently slowed down to match his pace.

“Who?”

“Natalia!” Bucky puffed as he pushed himself faster. It took him twice the effort it seemed to take Steve, who besides running was additionally distracted with looking decidedly confused.

“Natasha?” he asked.

There was that name again. Bucky was nowhere near in the mood to argue about this of all things. He rolled his eyes and took it in stride. “Yeah, sure, Natasha,” he agreed.

“She’s here?” Steve continued, as if this surprised him. “Where is she? Are there others?”

Bucky chose to ignore him. Now that Steve could, he most certainly would go off on his own, and here, now, in all this danger, Bucky wasn’t having that any more than he was stopping to figure out his mentor’s name.

Steve, similarly, didn’t seem to have much patience either. He shot on ahead at a pace Bucky tried and failed to match, and the one attempt made to call after him was either ignored or not heard at all. Where Steve thought he was going was anyone guess, but as he passed, Bucky’s stomach momentarily went cold at the unnatural sight of unplugged neck. Before he could find it in himself to be relieved, however, a truck barreled around the corner of the building and sped their way.

It took a wide turn, wide enough not to run them down, and for a second when it careened past them both Bucky let himself hope it was headed elsewhere. Then a squeal of tires proved otherwise. He threw a glance over his shoulders in time to see the truck swerving sharply sideways and accelerating back the way it had come. There was no mistaking this time that it was headed dead toward them. Bucky stopped in his tracks and drew his gun. It was a good thing he stopped to aim, because otherwise he might have gotten as far as to pull the trigger.

The truck passed a second time, first Bucky, then Steve, and then cut across their path to hold them off. Steve skidded to a stop just as Natasha threw the passenger side open.

“You boys look like you could use a lift,” she called.

The ground fell an inch or three under their feet. Steve didn’t waste any time asking questions before he climbed aboard. Similarly, Natasha didn’t even wait for him to get a foot in before she began the launch sequence to get the truck a precious six inches off the unstable ground. There it hovered, waiting, while Bucky closed the distance to join them.

The ground continued to lurch and shake under his feet. Once then twice he lost his footing, and then heaved himself back up again toward Steve’s outstretched hand. In the end, he had no choice but to jump. A second longer and he would have plummeted with the rest of the building, but his hand reached Steve’s in the nick of time. As the ground hurtled back to earth below them, Bucky climbed safely into the truck. It was a tight fit, made tighter by a giant package swaddled in black plastic at their feet. Steve wedged it free and threw it in the back.

“We got company,” he added. Bucky spun around too in time to see three EP cruisers closing in on their 6.

"That we do," Natasha agreed, adjusting her rear-view to get a look at them too. There was something in her tone that warned Bucky to grab onto something. Steve must have sensed it too, but he had nothing to grab hold of but Bucky’s arm. If Natasha noticed, she didn’t care.

“How are you feeling?” she asked Steve, casually, as the truck heaved sharply sideways and spiraled downward.

Steve braced his hands against the roof. “Actually,” he said, sounding kind of surprised. “Pretty great.”

“Good,” she replied, and then, “Bucky, his tracker.”

Trackers were generally imbedded by injection gun at the side of the upper arm where two muscle groups met. Bucky had no complaints when it came to feeling around for it. When he pressed at the right spot, Steve let him know by hissing in pain.

“That’s the one,” Natasha said. “Now short it out.”

That gave Bucky pause. “How?”

One of the vehicles pursuing them had succeeded in cutting into their path. Natasha swerved out of the way and ducked under a second. It was a bad time for questions, but they weren’t going to be able to get away with Steve as a bright red beacon on the enemy’s GPS.

As if in response, Natasha snapped her fingers. A bit of electricity jumped between her thumb and middle finger and buzzed there until she pulled the fingers far enough apart. Steve, jammed in the middle of the front seat, jumped like she’d shocked him.

“How—”

Natasha smiled with half of her mouth. “Remember when I told you about my time in the Labs?”

Bucky wasn’t listening. This wasn’t the time for explanations anyway. He snapped his organic fingers a few times lightly. As expected, nothing happened. He didn’t have the mods Natasha did.

“Regrowing nerve endings?” Steve recalled.

Then Bucky tried his other hand. Metal on metal didn’t make a sound, but the motion certainly did something. There was a faint click in the top joint of his finger and suddenly there was a charge forming through his palm to jump finger to finger. He didn’t need instruction on the rest.

“Sorry, Stevie,” he said, grabbed him by the arm to steady the implant site, and zapped him.

Steve yelped. Being shocked wasn’t nice; Bucky knew that better than anyone. The most he could do for him was make sure it was over with quick. Steve threw him a nasty glare for his trouble anyway as he hand shot up to cover the burn.

“ _Ow_ ,” he growled pointedly.

To his credit, Bucky did look apologetic. “I did say sorry.”

“You’re not done yet,” Natasha called as she weaved around a skyscraper. Not fifty feet above, the Metro 11 Lab hovered at its auxiliary power altitude.

Again, she demonstrated to Bucky what she wanted him to do. This time it was to swipe his organic hand over his synthetic wrist as if to trigger a motion detector. Bucky mimicked her. If there was one thing it was possible to miss about having the Labs programming his thoughts for him, it was the user manual to his own mod. At least then he would have found the main menu a lot sooner. As soon as he’d done as Natasha showed him, it appeared as a glowing red glove in the space just above the metal.

From there, it was just a matter of navigating to the software he needed. He pulled it up to the palm on his hand with no trouble and scanned Steve shoulder to elbow. Realizing what he was doing, Steve moved his hand to get him a better read. The burn on his arm was already fading from red to pink.

“He’s no longer transmitting,” Bucky confirmed when he was satisfied with his sweep.

“Perfect,” Natasha declared, and pointed their truck into freefall.

Steve grabbed Bucky’s arm so hard it was Bucky’s turn to yelp in pain. When Natasha got them within a hundred feet of the ground, he caved and grabbed the door handle in fear, too. At thirty, he squeezed his eyes shut, pulled Steve’s head to his chest, and resigned himself to die with Steve’s panicked voice ringing Natasha’s name in his ear.

At ten feet, Natasha pulled up and began a series of sharp turns.

Somewhere around the fourth or fifth time Bucky was slammed against the side of the truck, he realized his mod was beeping frantically.

“You said his tracker wasn’t transmitting!” Natasha shouted over the horns blaring from the stream of oncoming traffic she was weaving through.

“It wasn’t!” Bucky shouted back.

Steve was yelling something, too, but it was hard to make out with his face still pressed to Bucky’s chest. Bucky relented to his struggles and released him. The frantic beeping ceased.

“Then what is that?” Nastasha demanded.

Bucky tried to make out the readouts on his mod, a difficult feat in a truck making sharp turns at every possible angle. Steve somehow managed.

“Nothing,” he read for him, “It’s a received signal.”

Natasha’s face scrunched in confusion at the road.

“What?” she asked like she hadn’t heard correctly.

Bucky would have been equally incredulous if he wasn’t looking at the readout himself. Steve was right. He waved his hand over Steve’s head to be certain, and then his shoulders where he’d been holding him. The signal was still receiving. It was strongest, to Bucky’s sudden icy horror, at the back of Steve’s neck.

Without stopping to warn him, he grabbed Steve’s head and wrenched it down. As before, the back of his neck smooth. There was no plug. There wasn’t even a scar. He pushed down on the area and Steve yelped again.

“Stop that!” he snapped, and shoved himself out of Bucky’s grasp. His hand flew to the back of his neck. “That hurt.” A beat. “Why did that hurt?”

“Oh shit,” Natasha breathed.

“What?” Steve’s voice was higher now than it was a minute ago. Perhaps he noticed, like Bucky had, how Natasha had gone suddenly pale. “What does it mean?”

Natasha’s answer was to grab his wrist and turn it upward. Although he was not the target of her zap this time, Bucky still flinched.

“Do you see anything?” Natasha hissed. She was driving one-handed through oncoming traffic, but for once neither of the boys cared that the truck’s obstacle proximity alarms hadn’t stopped blaring. “Well?” she demanded when neither of them said anything.

Steve would have no reason to know what he was looking at, but Bucky recognized the shapes risen like welts from Steve’s skin instantly. The answer to Natasha’s question caught in his throat. His lips opened and closed, but no sound escaped them. His insides felt like they were suddenly doused with ice.

“Bucky?” Steve asked.

His voice was so full of worry, Natasha made the mistake of looking, too. She only had her eyes off the road for a moment, but it was enough for their van to clip the side of a building. Safety foam exploded into the interior of the vehicle and solidified into a oxi-gel on contact with air. It did its job perfectly. The occupants of the truck sat completely immobile as their vehicle careened sideways into the opposite wall of the alley and then tumbled end of end to a halt. The whole ordeal came only as a ringing in their ears. When the truck ground to a complete stop, it sat silently for one minute, then two, before the gel began to evaporate with a loud hiss and ample steam.

The first thing Bucky could do was cough the gel from his lungs. The second was to half-drag Steve from the wreckage. The accident itself barely phased him when compared to the enormity of what bubbled under Steve’s skin.

“Bucky,” was the first word Steve managed when he could fill his lungs with air again. “I got it. I’m fine.”

Bucky didn’t even hear him. He stumbled to the other side of the alley with Steve in tow, until finally it was Steve’s turn to catch him from sinking against the wall.

“Are you alright?” Steve was asking him now. The welt was still there but fading quickly. Bucky couldn’t take his eyes off it. He didn’t even notice when Natasha came up beside them, the black bag from the passenger's seat strapped to her back, or when Steve had managed to lower him to the floor.

“What’s wrong with him?” Steve asked her.

“Me?” Bucky spat before she could get a word out. “It’s what’s wrong with _you._   _Look_ at you.” He gestured to the welt, but Steve didn’t seem to get it. How could he? He was looking at it upside down.

“C’mon,” Natasha said. “Get up, both of you. We need to get somewhere without a—” she gestured toward the column of steam. It was white, meaning that it was an Alpha’s vehicle that had crashed. The SOS would take priority over lower accidents. They might as well be hanging around beside a giant beacon.

“But Bucky—” Steve protested.

“He’s right, he’ll be fine for now,” Natasha told him. “Help him up.”

She took one elbow and Steve took the other. Bucky shook them both off.

“No,” he growled as he got to his feet on his own. “We have to go back! If there's a way to reverse it, it's back the way we came.”

“Reverse what?” Steve pleaded. Bucky only gestured angrily at the welt. Much to his frustration, Steve didn’t seem to get it. He even had the gall to shrug. “It's just one of those pain tattoos. Doesn't bother me. It'll be invisible again in a minute.”

“That's not the point!”

“Boys,” Natasha cut him off before he could get further. “Steve is in Epsilons. Right this minute, getting out of sight is our top priority.”

Bucky actually almost forgot about Steve's grey jumpsuit. If they were seen by anyone or anything, they'd have trouble fast. He needed a change of clothes. That seemed hard to focus on given everything else.

“What's going on?” Steve demanded again.

“A change of clothes, before anything else,” Natasha repeated. For the first time, Bucky noticed that she looked shaken too. “We're lucky we landed where we did. The docks are only a few blocks that way. We can hide there while we come up with a plan.”

“Without being seen?” Bucky reminded her. “In the middle of the afternoon?”

“Better than staying here,” Natasha pointed out, and that was a good an argument as any.

Nevertheless, being outside at all was a no-win situation. Either they went quickly and a person spotted them, or they took their time and a surveillance drone did. So quick it was, with Natasha in the lead and Bucky bringing up the back. There wasn’t much time to exchange words. After a lot of weaving, a cracked window in a shipping warehouse granted them just what they were looking for. By the time Bucky tumbled in last, Steve was already standing over him at his full height with arms crossed and eyebrows furrowed.

“Start explaining.”

Bucky couldn’t help but look to Natasha before even opening his mouth to answer. He found her looking back with an expression on her face he couldn’t read.

“Secure the perimeter,” she told him, setting down her strange parcel. “I’ll take this one.”

“No,” Bucky replied immediately, and got to his feet. There was nothing to think about. “I’ll do it. You go.”

She didn’t argue, although she did hesitate, albeit briefly. The look she cast Bucky over her shoulder was meant as an out. He didn’t take it, and soon her footsteps disappeared into the dark of the warehouse along with the rest of her.

Bucky turned back to Steve. “At least sit?” he suggested.

Steve shook his head. He was in one of his stubborn moods again. All things considered, for once that was a good sign, but not one Bucky could cling to when the look aimed at him had the bite of accusation. He wished he had a better answer than he did.

“It’s a Roman numeral,” he said finally. It was the easiest thing, though clearly not the answer Steve was looking for. “The number fifteen.”

Steve narrowed his eyes and waited for Bucky to elaborate. He didn’t. “Okay,” he said then. “I’ll bite. Why are you afraid of the number fifteen?”

“It’s an ID number,” Bucky replied, without denying the accusation.

“Fifteen?” Steve asked. “Just... fifteen?” He didn’t buy it then, and he didn’t buy it when Bucky nodded either. Instead he took a step closer and gripped Bucky’s shoulder. “You sure you’re alright? Last time I saw ya, you were bleeding out.”

Bucky flinched from the touch, which got Steve to take his hand back right quick like he’d burned it.

“I’m fine,” he said stiffly, rubbing the warmth Steve’s hand left behind. “I’m better. I’m finally starting to get my head on straight.”

Steve studied him with skepticism. “You sure about that?”

It was Bucky’s turn to glare at him. Steve must have realized his misstep though, because he backed off and sat himself down on the edge of a crate like Bucky had asked him to in the first place. There was enough room beside him for another. It remained that way while Bucky paced.

“It’s an ID number,” Bucky repeated. Then to clarify, he added, “the program’s pretty small.”

“What program?” Steve asked. Bucky would like to think he sounded cautious; he wouldn’t know better as he wasn’t looking at his face. In fact, he was trying to look anywhere but. The truth of the matter was that Steve was more curious than cautious, like he always was.

Bucky stopped his agitated pacing. With a shuddering breath, he snapped his fingers as Natasha had shown him. The warehouse was so dark, the little bit of electricity lit his features up blue. The light jumped when he touched it to his organic arm, and when he removed it, held steady again to illuminate the three marks like a welts rose from the skin of his forearm and formed the characters XIV.

Bucky breathed self-loathing through his teeth.

“Mine.”

Steve looked from him to the welts and back up again.

“Yours?” he said. Bucky waited for Steve’s eyebrows to disentangle and shoot into his hairline, or for him to bound to his feet. He did neither. He just rubbed his arm absently and kept frowning. “That can’t be.”

“It’s not about the hardware,” Bucky said as he watched him. “Not really. It’s the software that makes us a...” he struggled to find the word, “a series.”

Not surprisingly, Steve’s hand moved to the back of his neck. He was frowning still, the gears turning in his head.

“...That signal earlier?”

Bucky didn’t have an answer for that one. At a loss, all he could do was shrug. He knew it was the worst time to draw up a blank.

“The labs wouldn’t break their own mandates,” Steve went on as he continues to feel the back of his neck. “Wireless plugs are banned. There’s no way to guarantee a secure line. That was the whole point of bothering with cables and ports in the first place. Security. Privacy. Otherwise all you really need to transmit data from point A to point B is...” His fingers stopped when he found what he was looking for. Bucky could see it in his wince as he pressed down on the implant site and paled considerably. “...the right chip.”

Before he could stop himself, Bucky closed the distance between them and took the vacant seat.

“Steve,” he said, as gently as he could. “I’m so sorry.”

He laid a hand over Steve's as if trying to preserve the warmth in it, keep the ice at bay. Steve's shoulders relaxed ever so slightly at the touch, but he didn't look up.

“Steve,” Bucky said again. 

“What do you mean ‘your program’?” Steve asked instead.

“Steve,” Bucky pleaded. “Don’t make me say it.”

“Back at SHIELD, someone called you the Winter Soldier. That can’t be. That cautionary tale is older than both of us.”

He was going to make him say it.

“I’m not the first.” Bucky had to force the words. His mouth didn’t want to form them any more than his throat did. “I’m the fourteenth. To make me, they had to shove all the memories of the last thirteen Soldiers into my plug and leave my brain to deal with the consequences. Thirteen lifetimes, all swimming around in my head until I had no choice but to integrate them or go insane.” He looked up, unsure if he was going to cry or be sick. “That’s how the program keeps going. It’s not one assassin. It’s a string of them. And now you have fourteen of us in your head to deal with.”

Steve’s face softened at that, of all things.

“Yours too?” He asked, and then at last he frowned like he was supposed to. “I don’t feel anything.”

“It doesn’t all come at once,” Bucky explained solemnly. “At first it just sits there because your wetware doesn’t know what to do with it all. I don’t know how long until the nightmares start. It ends when you let it integrate, but I don’t know how long that takes either. The whole thing is a blur for me.”

“It varies,” Natasha supplied helpfully. The boys tore their eyes off each other to see her step out of the darkness and make her way to the seat across from them. Beside him, Bucky felt Steve move an inch away from him on instinct. He took his hands with him. “The hallucinations will start in a day or two. How long you hold out is entirely up to you,” Natasha continued. “But it won’t be fourteen lifetimes. Number One was unplugged. Two, Three, and Four were unplugged and technically part of the Zephyr program, so they were only included in the count by technicality. And Thirteen never successfully integrated. That leaves nine, if that makes it any easier for you.” She leaned forward on her elbows and offered a smile with mostly sympathy behind it. “I know it doesn’t.”

Somehow, that just made Steve cough on a laugh. “It really doesn’t,” he agreed. “Do I even want to know what ‘failed to integrate’ means?”

Natasha’s smile grew more wan. “You really don’t.”

“Is there a way to stop it?” Bucky asked.

Natasha’s smile faded altogether. “I don’t know,” she admitted as she sat back. “You’ve essentially been implanted with a virus. Even if it was possible to run an antivirus to stop it—an antivirus, mind you, that doesn’t yet exist—you have no interface to work with. We couldn’t run it even if we had it.”

“So we take the implant out,” Steve suggested.

“And leave you braindead?” Bucky cut in. “ _Fuck_ no. We’re not taking it out. Out of the question.”

“We don’t know if it’s the same as taking out a plug,” Steve argued. “We don’t know anything about it. It could work.”

“We’re not digging into your brainstem unprepared either way,” Natasha said just as Bucky opened his mouth to give him a piece of his mind. “We’d need a lab and some way to see what we’re doing before we even think about going in. Equipment. You’re not just a Delta anymore, Rogers. You’re important.”

The constipated look on Steve’s face was unreadable.

Bucky went on without him. “Does SHIELD have all that stuff where they’re going?” It was a plan that banked a lot on Steve’s ability to hold out, but he saw little other choice on the matter.

“They might,” Natasha said, but she looked downright pessimistic. Bucky knew the next word out of her mouth. “ _But_ , they’re vulnerable, and Steve is wireless. Even if the New Order can’t control Steve as the Winter Soldier, they can still download data from his eyes and ears any time they wish. They could be monitoring us right now.”

The guilty look on Steve's face said he'd already figured as much out for himself. “We’re not going back to SHIELD,” he declared. “I’m not going within a hundred miles of those people if it puts them in danger again.”

“You don’t have any other choice,” Bucky growled at him. “And you’re running out of time every minute we spend arguing about this. SHIELD can figure out what to do with you when the time comes. _You_ don’t have the luxury. ”

“We’ll think of something else,” Steve hissed.

“There _is_ nothing else! We fix this soon or you’re lost forever!”

“Actually,” Natasha cut in. She said it quietly, but it did the trick of getting their attention. For the first time, Bucky realized both he and Steve were on their feet. Natasha was watching them with a look that made Bucky feel like she was studying their organs through their skin. “There might be somewhere else we can go.” She paused, as if waiting for one of them to suggest it. “Steve’s father’s safe house.”

Bucky was relieved to see Steve as thrown by the suggestion as he was.

“My father had a safe house?”

“I assume,” Natasha shrugged. “Did he ever tell you about it?”

Steve shook his head. “Never.”

“He never told you about where to turn should something bad happen to him?” Natasha pressed.

Steve’s lip curled. He gestured around at the dark warehouse, as if to point out that something very bad had indeed happened, and yet here they were. “I was eleven. He didn’t tell me much.”

His words reminded Bucky of something Natasha had told him the other day.  

“Didn’t you promise to tell us what you knew about Steve’s family once we rescued him?”

“You know about my family?” Steve butt in. “How is it that you know more about them than I do?”

“I was getting around to it,” Natasha replied as she looked from one to the other. She had a right to sound defensive with the looks she was getting, but it wasn’t as if they’d gotten a chance to talk freely before now. “Besides, I don’t know much. Only what SHIELD knows.”

“And what does SHIELD know?” Steve demanded, taking a step forward.

“Like I said, not much," Natasha replied, meeting his eye unflinchingly, "but if you want to hear it I suggest you stand down.”

Bucky sat, but Steve considered her for a while before he decided to trust her. When he took a seat beside Bucky, it was far enough that no part of them touched. Ever bit of him looked on edge. The air itself was tensed, it seemed.

“There are gaps,” Natasha began. “Big ones. But what we do know starts with a woman Captain Rogers grew close with during the Uprisings, Sharon Carter.” Beside Bucky, Steve perked up slightly. He recognized the name. “The first big gap starts when she was declared Missing in Action following Captain Rogers’s destruction of the surveillance helicarriers and ends when she showed up suddenly at SHIELD two years later with a young boy.”

“Wait a minute,” Bucky interrupts. “Are you talking about the Quincentennial Decommissioning? Those helicarriers were scheduled to be destroyed to mark their 500 year anniversary.”

“Exactly the sort of news you broadcast to hide an act of terrorism against the very symbols of the New Order's power,” Natasha replied calmly. “Those helicarriers were very much blown out of the sky against the New Order’s wishes. Captain Rogers and what would later become SHIELD intended for the attack to end the New Order. If Captain Rogers hadn’t been captured, they might very well have succeeded in toppling the world order. But instead, Captain Rogers was assassinated under custody and the New Order rebuilt a surveillance system even more insidious than the last. And here we are.”

“And Sharon Carter?” Steve asked.

“Right,” Natasha continued. “She returned to SHIELD seeking asylum following the new Mandates that the New Order began issuing en masse to squelch the Uprisings. Hers and the boy's genomes were both added to the database, and while it was clear right away that she was the boy’s X donor, his Y donor was not in the system. Sharon claimed not to know who it was, and incidentally,” Natasha added quietly, like she was sharing a secret. “Captain Rogers never allowed his DNA to be cataloged. He had good reason; it would almost certainly have been weaponized, and he argued that taking it by force would make what would later become SHIELD no better than the New Order. He was right, but that’s beside the point. On file, little James Carter only had half a family tree. In fact, it wasn’t until that bullet we recovered a few weeks back that his parentage could be officially confirmed. But official records and common sense are two totally different things, boys, and to those that knew Captain Rogers and watched Sharon’s son grow up, the resemblance was... more than coincidental. Luckily, the upper echelons of SHIELD could talk, but there wasn’t much they could do until the boy came of age.”

“That was my dad,” Steve realized quietly, and then, “what was it they wanted with him?”

Natasha smiled. “Find the linchpin, I assume. And from there, recreate the serum and restart the war. Sharon must have known this, of course. She is on file denying her son permission to take any sort of combat training with SHIELD whatsoever, which surprised a lot of people at the time given her own skill in combat. It’s possible she trained him herself, but if you ask me, I think she was trying to make him as unappealing a weapon as possible. At any rate, it didn’t matter. He ran away when he was thirteen. Sharon was thoroughly questioned as to his whereabouts, and then _very_ thoroughly questioned again. When she didn’t budge, she was kept in custody, which is where she died a few years before I came to SHIELD. And that’s where the story ends.”

"They tortured her?" Steve asked, incredulous. Between his face and the pinch in his voice, it was obvious to Bucky that this was the worst thing he'd ever heard done to someone. Steve had always been so painfully innocent.  
  
Natasha cast down look gave him his answer regardless.

He studied her, and then swallowed whatever painful revelations this new piece of information gave him. "There has to be more," he went on. “Where did my dad go? Who helped him mod that house in the Delta ghetto? Where does my mom come in?”  
  
All Natasha could do was shrug. “I had hoped he might have left you with clues to that. Somewhere to turn if things went south. Someone you could always trust, even with your life?  
  
The answer came to Bucky immediately, but it was too ridiculous to say. He watched the gears in Steve's head turn. After a while, he shot Bucky a look that spoke of the same train of thought. They both knew it, even if it sounded completely unplugged.  
  
“This is going to sound crazy," Steve told Natasha at last.  
  
She smiled her cat-like smile and leaned forward on her elbows.  
  
“Try me.”  
  
They looked at each other again, and said the name in unison.

**Author's Note:**

> [Sam](http://samthebirdbae.tumblr.com/) drew some fanart for the opening scene: [Untitled](http://samthebirdbae.tumblr.com/post/149611295278/the-thing-steve-pulled-from-it-was-wrapped-in)


End file.
